Sunday, April 2, 2017

Fjordman : Irrational Fear of Islam?

Irrational Fear of Islam?

Why "Islamophobia" is a meaningless term mainly used to harass and intimidate non-Muslims.

glossocracy
In his book How the West Was Lost, the Russian-born author Alexander Boot suggested that Westerners no longer live in a democracy but in a glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.
One
could posit that we live in a world dominated at least as much by
images, especially moving images in the form of television and movies,
as by words, but words clearly matter. In many cases, those who coin new
words, or manage to force the public to accept their definition of old
words, win the struggle. In practice, this is done by those who control
the propaganda flow, in the education system and the mass media.

Islamophobia
We
now have a term for an imaginary problem: Islamophobia. It has become
the subject of international conferences and is treated as a threat to
world peace. In contrast, racist violence against people of European
origins, a very real problem from South Africa via North America to
Western European suburbs, does not exist because we have no special word
for it. This is word magic. “Tolerance” and “diversity” mean
dispossessing Europeans from the countries their ancestors created,
whereas “intolerance,” “hate” and “racism” imply any opposition by
Europeans to their own dispossession and organized national destruction.

On Aug. 25 2012, the columnist Doug Saunders published an essay in The Globe and Mail,
the largest-circulation national newspaper in Canada, entitled “The
unfounded fear of Muslim immigration.” He there engaged in the (by now
mandatory) exercise of mentioning Islam-critical individuals such as
Bruce Bawer, Thilo Sarrazin, Geert Wilders, Gisele Littman (Bat Ye’or)
and Mark Steyn alongside the confessed mass murderer Anders Behring
Breivik. Although the author added that these writers have never “explicitly
advocated violence,” he seemed to suggest that they implicitly
contributed to Breivik’s massacre by writing truthfully about how Muslim
immigration is affecting Western countries.

Doug Saunders is the London-based European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail who “writes
a weekly column devoted to the larger themes and intellectual concepts
behind international news, and has won the National Newspaper Award,
Canada’s counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on four occasions.” He is
completing a book about the alleged myth that a tidal wave of Muslim
immigration is threatening the Western world. He admits that in London
he can witness a rapidly growing Islamic presence first-hand and that
large sections of that and other European cities are now dominated by
non-Europeans, but he claims this isn't a problem:

What unites
the ideologies of al-Qaeda and of the "Eurabia" and "Muslim tide"
writers is a common belief that there is one creature called "the
Muslim" and another called "the Westerner." Yet there is no such
distinction. Muslims are adopting the universal values of our society in
the same way (not always easy [sic]) as other religious minorities. The
shisha bar and the kebab shop are becoming part of Western culture,
much like espresso and Yiddish expressions – but there is no threat to
our core values.

Less than a month after these words
were written, violent anti-Western protests and riots swept across the
Islamic world, targeting Western embassies while using an obscure movie
as a pretext for this Jihad.

On August 26 2012, writer Nathan Lean published an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times
using the Breivik trial as a verbal stick to beat those writing about
Islamization into submission, claiming that “heightened anxiety over the
presence of Muslims in Europe and the United States has ignited a
string of attacks on the faith community.” That’s nonsense. On the
contrary, nearly every week we see stories about Muslim immigrant gangs
harassing the natives in European cities, sometimes even attacking the police armed with guns.

Lean
specifically singled out such writers as Robert Spencer and Pamela
Geller for allegedly agitating a “climate of hate” in North America and
beyond. He concluded his essay by stating that “The discourse of hate
must be stopped before it affects other extremists.” As Spencer — who
lives with death threats from Muslims due to his writings — commented at Jihad Watch, this is a barely concealed call for restricting freedom of speech.

Lean
writes about the existence of what he terms an “Islamophobia industry”
of evil right-wingers in the Western world who are nasty and spread
prejudice against tolerant Muslims for no particular reason other than
being mean. He has contributed to The Huffington Post, a very large and usually left-leaning news website and Internet newspaper, where he has stated that “Islamophobia
is undeniably a form of racism.” Not surprisingly, his writings are
being praised by the notoriously pro-Islamic author Karen Armstrong, who
claims that virulent Islamophobia is now “endangering world peace.”

Nathan Lean soon after followed up with yet another article in the Los Angeles Times arguing that the general public led by enlightened activists must from now on “publicly shame”
and “marginalize” Islam-critical writers, who, according to him, breed
terrorism by warning against groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

I once listened to the great Dutch Arabist Hans Jansen,
who reminded us that the Koran actually commands Muslims to instill
fear of Islam (Islamophobia) into the hearts of non-Muslims, using any
means necessary to force them to submit to Islam’s might. The Koran and
Islamic teachings thus make Islamophobia mandatory.

I agree with
his insight, but only up to a point. First of all, many non-Muslims
despise Islam at least as much as we fear it. Second, it is my
understanding that the term “phobia” does not merely mean “fear of,” but
more specifically an irrational and totally unfounded or at least
greatly exaggerated fear of something.
Is fear of Islam really irrational, seen in light of Islam’s violent past and still-violent present?

Seemingly echoing The Communist Manifesto,
Thorbjørn Jagland of the Labor Party, then the President of the
Norwegian Parliament and today the Secretary General of the Council of
Europe, warned in 2006
that a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Islamophobia. He
stated this just a few weeks after violent Islamic riots around the
world and attacks on Scandinavian embassies over a few cartoons.
By
September 2012, this dangerous trend had escalated to attacks on German
and American embassies and the Jihadist murder of the American
ambassador to Libya.
The writers Sindre Bangstad and Cora Alexa Døving warn
that a wave of right-wing extremist “Islamophobia” is sweeping Europe.
Døving works for the Holocaust Center in Oslo and has several times gone
far in suggesting that Muslims in the West are now being treated in
ways similar to how the Nazis treated European Jews. This preposterous
suggestion fortunately received some richly deserved criticism from the
author Herman Willis.

Having
rabbitophobia, a paralyzing fear of rabbits, could with considerable
justification be classified as an irrational fear. Rabbits can
potentially carry diseases, as can mice and many other animals, but
apart from that they hardly constitute much of a threat to humans.
Likewise, it is hard to find any rational justification for
coulrophobia, a fear of clowns, apart from some bad childhood experience
that somehow stuck to adulthood.

However, one could not sensibly
be said to suffer similarly from greatwhitesharkophobia or
crocodilophobia. That’s because big sharks and crocodiles are large
predators that are genuinely dangerous. Having some healthy fear of them
is perfectly sane and may help you stay alive. This doesn’t mean that
great white sharks or big crocodiles will attack and kill humans every
time they have the opportunity to do so, but they are perfectly capable
of carrying out such attacks, and sometimes they do.

The same
principle applies to so-called Islamophobia. An ideology that has as its
stated goal to put the entire world under its eternal rule, by force if
necessary, and to kill those who stand in its way, criticize it or
leave it, is genuinely dangerous. Having some healthy doses of fear and
skepticism of such a force is perfectly rational.
Islam has well
over one thousand years of unprovoked aggression on multiple continents
under its belt and today is well underway with a new wave of aggression,
this time unfortunately also in Western cities and suburbs.
Did
the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh suffer from a totally irrational fear
of Islam when he had his throat cut in broad daylight in Amsterdam in
2004 by a proud and dedicated Islamic Jihadist who murdered him for
mocking Islam?
Or did Theo van Gogh in fact die because he had too little fear of Islam rather than too much?

“Islamophobia”
is a meaningless term. Just like the word “racism,” it is mainly used
to harass Europeans and intimidate them into silence and submission in
the face of the tsunami of mass immigration currently engulfing their
countries. The simplest way to get rid of Islamophobia is to remove the
term from our active vocabulary.

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